Aug 26, 2004

Virtual Worlds 101: Draft Syllabus

The following course outline is for a upperclass undergraduate seminar on "Virtual Worlds" here at Indiana University. I'd be eager to get some commentary before inflicting this stuff on helpless students. Don't forget that they are college students, after all, and won't be enthusiastic about reading thousands of pages. Also, book purchases are to be kept to a minimum. The goal is to cover the basics without imposing too much burden. Plus I want lots of time to just discuss things. Suggestions for improvement / change of direction / more representative works are welcome.

Course abstract. The seminar introduces students to massively multi-user spaces on the internet, especially those with a role-playing game component. We will go over the history of virtual worlds as a communication technology, and survey their current state. We will use theories from a wide range of disciplines to predict future growth trends. We will also discuss implications for human interaction and public policy in the near and long term. Students will have about 100 pages of reading weekly: some of it fun, none of it technical, all of it interesting. Grading based on in-class presentations, a final paper, and overall participation. If you’re interested in learning how much your grandchildren’s world will be different from ours, this is a good course for you. Less lofty objectives include: introducing students to the most rapidly growing sector of the game industry, making them familiar with the guts of avatar-mediated communication technology, and point out some of the more pressing policy issues being raised.

Format: The seminar will rely exclusively on round-table discussions of the readings and course material, jump-started each session by a specific student.

Grading. Grades will be based on 1) three kinds of in-class presentation work (worth 10% each, 30% total), 2) a research paper (50%), and 3) overall class participation (20%). The research paper should aim at 15 - 20 pages and can be a critique/analysis of an existing virtual world (example: explain how the combat system in Game X encourages grief play) or a piece of original research (example: discuss the implications of censorship as applied to a player-run news website). More information about the paper will be given in class. The paper will be the basis for a presentation to the class near the end of the semester (10% of the total grade). A second presentation will be a brief, 10-minute ‘first impressions’ report on a massively multi-user world of your choice; this is also 10% of the total grade. The final 10% of presentations grading comes from brief presentations / introductions of the readings for the class. Each student may have more than one of these; the total weight will add up to 10%. Class participation is based on your overall behavior in class: contributing in a friendly, respectful, sincere way. Highest grades in presentations and class participation go to those who can clearly summarize the essence of their ideas and then engage in friendly Q&A about them.

Materials. Most of the class readings are available on the web. There are some items that you are required to purchase:

November 16. Long-run implications
Castronova, On Virtual Economies
Jenkins, The Virtual World as a Company Town
Ondrejka, Living on the Edge
Reynolds, Playing a “Good” Game
Ward, The Dark Side of Digital Utopia

November 23. Workshop: how to make formal presentations

November 30. Student presentations

December 7. Student presentations

December 13. This is a Monday. Papers are due in the Turnitin.com dropbox by 2pm.

Comments

1.

Excellent list; you prompted me to reread the Borges story, I'd never made the connection to virtual worlds before. Thank you! But you have so many "classics", I was surprised not to see The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat.

I'd second Nelson's comment. Oh, and I'll have an update of "Living on the Edge" by then -- nothing like writing a fresh 30 page chapter to make all previous writings seem like they need improvement :-).

1) Either George Martin's "Sandkings" (the original short story) or Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God"--both classic SF stories on the theme of wanting to run or control a minature world.

2) Short selection from Epstein's Growing Artificial Societies. I'm working on an essay about this now, but I'm really struck at how little the virtual worlds/game crowd cross-pollinates with the artificial societies/social simulation/emergence & complexity crowd.

I have True Names as recommended reading for my Intro class ("Living in the Information Age"). Might put it here too.

Didn't know about Sandkings or Microcosmic God - will track those down. I've thought about the Epstein stuff in the past, in connection to some poli. sci. work I was doing; didn't think of it here. Good tip.

Hamlet: he's living in a society whose reality is different from his own. Both in terms of fact - the dead king was murdered or died in his sleep - and in terms of normatives - the new king is legitimate or not. He then constructs a fantasy world - the play within the play - that depicts his reality explicitly. Is Hamlet's Real actually real? Only the ghost told him it was. Are ghosts real? This cosmic uncertainty causes a lot of the delay and also generates the wierdness in his relationships, termed by others as 'madness.'

With Shakespeare, it's not whether there are any examples between individual and social constructions of truth, it's which one. Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Winter's Tale, As You Like It, maybe a few others.

Absolutely will weigh in to support True Names. Snowcrash is fun, but True Names isn't just great sci-fi --- its really raises important issues about the way being virtual allows you to become more yourself than you ever were before. Put it right up front, since this issue of the way selfhood is released from the confines of materiality is, as I understand it, central to these discussions of virtual reality.

I think for questions of loosing track of normative/ontological judgements you could do a lot better than Hamlet. Midsummer's is the classic 'world within a world' play be Shakespeare in that it tracks between /four/ layers of reality: What the lovers do while ensorcelled, what they remember of it when they awake (the 'official' story of what happened), the mechanicals' play, and Puck's own final injunction that the play the audience watches 'is no more yielding than a dream.' "Dream," right -- that's the central idea of being unable to tell 'reality' from 'fantasy', and what Midsummer moots.

This popping between levels of reality happens a lot in fiction (mad shouts out to Jasper Fforde here). In sociology, too, the 'social construction of reality' has got a great deal of discussion someday want to explore and integrate into the syllabus.

Overall, the syllabus looks rawking, but it seems to be a very close reading of the new literature on virtual worlds that isn't very closely integrated with preexisting work in other disciplines (personhood, identity, communal construal of meaning, etc). It doesn't have to be, of course. But I think an intro week that raises the issues of virtual reality in the context of other courses the students may have taken (soc, anthro *cough*, lit crit) and lays the issues out on the table at a general level would make it even more rawking. Of course, it's very easy for me to say that -- I don't have to teach it!

All in all, though -- looks great. Good enough for me to plagiarize. And that, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.

BTW, a few years ago emergent systems were a really hot topic with designers. The problem is that the first rule of emergent systems is the Law of Unintended Consequences. Since "unexpected emergent gameplay" is very hard to separate from "unforseen balance nightmare of the first order", most people gave up on it, and quite a few started looking for ways to minimize emergent phenomena in their games.

The challenge as I see it is that the level of discussion, of say, Sugarscape (e.g. featured in Epstein's book), of Schelling's work (another canonical example), of where the Netlogo and Repast communities are at in developing models... there is a gap in the fidelity of these models, worlds, and say, that of an MMORPG - a monstrously more complicated thing simply but for the kinds of things the MMORPG crowd cares about (e.g. fine-grained playbalancing etc..) folk haven't developed the right sorts of abstractions for 'em (btw some of this discussion hinted at here.

Yet, personally, I believe that to build large-scale and "complete" (larger-scale, self-sustaining, emergent, yack yack) sorts of worlds, folk are going to need to be able to think at those levels, eventually.

IMO Good news, is that this gap between communities over the years ahead may shrink - both as the models on the society simulationist side become more sophisticated (gratis tools and tech improvements that facilitate) and as those on the MMORPG side (e.g. John Arras) push in that direction.

erica: i always thought the amount of time i spent playing everquest when i was in college should have earned me a few credits.

Which for me sounds like the big danger of a course like this. You will get some students actually interested in what you are teaching. But there will be others which see the course as a great opportunity to receive credits for playing Everquest. Good luck in sorting them out.

Any consideration for topics concerning making a living in virtual worlds? Possibly highlighting Julian's blog and maybe a few other success stories such as MySuperSales and IGE. I'm sure you probably will touch on this throughout the course.

What about ethical considerations concerning the MMORPG sweat shops in Russia and other places? IGE denounces the use of macros, but admits that some of their supply comes from sweat shops. Even though the rules are broken using macro programs, is it better to use human labor instead of computer labor? Not often do we find ourselves going backwards, using humans to do a job that computers perform more efficiently. This topic may be outside the scope of your course though.

Any consideration for topics concerning making a living in virtual worlds? Possibly highlighting Julian's blog and maybe a few other success stories such as MySuperSales and IGE. I'm sure you probably will touch on this throughout the course.

What about ethical considerations concerning the MMORPG sweat shops in Russia and other places? IGE denounces the use of macros, but admits that some of their supply comes from sweat shops. Even though the rules are broken using macro programs, is it better to use human labor instead of computer labor? Not often do we find ourselves going backwards, using humans to do a job that computers perform more efficiently. This topic may be outside the scope of your course though.

Any consideration for topics concerning making a living in virtual worlds? Possibly highlighting Julian's blog and maybe a few other success stories such as MySuperSales and IGE. I'm sure you probably will touch on these throughout the course.

What about ethical considerations concerning the MMORPG sweat shops in Russia and other places? IGE denounces the use of macros, but admits that some of their supply comes from these sweat shops. Even though the rules are broken using macro programs, is it better to have human labor instead? These questions may be outside the bounds of your course, though.

Tobold> You will get some students actually interested in what you are teaching. But there will be others which see the course as a great opportunity to receive credits for playing Everquest. Good luck in sorting them out.

:) That's what long reading lists and paper assignments are for. But you know, it is like game design. I have to prototype, and then do some balancing based on who the gamers are. Takes a couple of years.

Damn.... I've been going nuts trying to build my own advanced Sugarscape modelling environment, here's two all ready to roll. But looking at them, I may want to continue with my own anyway, there are different imperatives in using Sugarscape as a world-building tool with an eye towards use in a game, and using it as an exploratory environment. But I still could have saved a lot of time with these to look at.

Ted - sounds great! We've had several classes spend time in Second Life -- last semester we had classes from 5 different schools who were studying everything from urban planning to game design. One group from Vassar even put on a play! We have a program whereby we'll give free SL accounts to each student for the duration of the semester. If you're interested let me know.

For the Sociology and Community section I would also recommend T.L.'s "Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds" in R. Schroeder (ed.), The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. London: Springer-Verlag, 2002. This is a thorough yet relatively brief and accessible overview of avatar/identity/virtual body issues in social virtual worlds. It's online here.

I was also going to suggest Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations but perhaps forcing pomo french theory on undergrads is not a great idea. Save it for when you get to teach a graduate course. Boy would I love to see that syllabus too.

Wow, wished I'd read this post a couple of weeks ago when I was doing something very similar! It turns out that I'm teaching a course on Virtual Communities as well. Less on MMRPGs and avatar space, but lots of overlap here. I'll post my readings and themes below in case they are of use.

And now I'm going to go and read that Vinge story . . .

Texts:
Negroponte, being digital
AJ Kim, Community Building on the Web
Lessig, Code

Theme 1: Foundations of communities
Readings
1) Tonnies, F. On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.
2) Oldenburg, R. The Great, Good Place. Ch. 1: The Problem of Place in America.

Topics
1) What is a community?
2) Types of community: differences, classifications, etc.
3) The question of proximity
4) Functions of communities
5) Things that shape community.
6) State of American community
7) If time: Wenger’s Communities of Practice

For the "learning in virtual worlds" section, you might want to check out some work done in Scotland by Paul Maharg among others. He is at the University of Strathclyde. They've experimented with several different types of virtual learning environments, inculding something close to a virtual world. He gave a presentation at this summer's CALI conference (www.cali.org) and I believe a webcast stream of the presentation is available on the 2004 Conference page at the CALI website.

From what I remember, they essentially created a small town, mostly through websites, and then interacted through email with the professors playing the role of many different members of the virtual community.

Here's the published description of that presentation:

Legal sims: from EverQuest to Ardcalloch (and back again)

Jack Balkin's recent piece on virtual worlds (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/jbalkin/articles/virtual_liberty1.pdf) is yet one more example of the emergence of virtual worlds as legal, economic and cultural entities that deserve serious consideration by real world analysts. Legal education has been slow to discover that virtual simulation is a valuable method of learning about the law, the legal profession and its transactions. In this presentation I shall demonstrate how the Glasgow Graduate School of Law (GGSL) has used virtual simulation to enhance student learning in a postgraduate professional practice course. The tour will include some of the online tools that students and staff used within the simulated environment; learning theory that guided the Learning Technologies Development Unit within the GGSL, and feedback from the users.

I'm so bummed. IU is massively under-enrolled this semester and one consequence is that many new courses are threatened with cancellation. Including mine! Oh bother. I thought the undergrads would 'get' this virtual world thing and come to the class in droves. Nope. Wierd. I guess it's one of those moments where you think, look, either your vision of the technological future is true but it's just too out-of-the-box for most people to get excited about right away...or...you are completely and totally insane and no one should pay any attention to your ravings. Leaning to the latter atm...

Edward Castronova>either your vision of the technological future is true but it's just too out-of-the-box for most people to get excited about right away...or...you are completely and totally insane and no one should pay any attention to your ravings.

Don't let the potential low enrollment in your class get you down. I've found that there are often a lot of other factors, completely unrelated to the courses or the profs themselves, that can affect enrollment in particular classes.

I've done two broadly introductory courses on virtual worlds, one in 2000 and one in 2002 (2002 course titled Virtual Worlds and Spaces, with colleague Troels Degn Johansson, who introduced some interesting readings on the space perspective).
Unfortunately, the course plans are in Danish only, and they are written before Bartle's book came out, but I'd like to share them anyway, perhaps there are some unknown texts for some here - and hopefully, the readings suggested can be spotted in the midst of weird Danish words ;).
Personally, I've always been fond of Susan C. Warshauer's "Multi-User Environment Studies: Defining a Field of Study and Four Approaches to the Design of Multi-User Environments", one of the first papers I saw who tried to introduce a more theoreticallly-methodologically perspective on the study of virtual environments (with a humanities slant). In it, she also introduces some of her readings on the subject from her 1998 class...(abstract: http://www3.oup.co.uk/litlin/hdb/Volume_13/Issue_04/130199.sgm.abs.html - article itself has sadly been taken offline)

There is a rich, very old discourse on virtuality in the Gnostic tradition, addressing questions about perception and radical doubt, and the ethics of the virtual (if this world is just a prison created by the demiurge, what responsibilities do we have to each other? What does accountability mean for a virtual subject? etc.) I think readings from late antiquity - Plotinus especially - could be compelling.

The course has been cancelled, but I've been asked to re-fashion it for an introductory class (100-level). It iwll now be offered as an intensive 8-week class in the second half of this semester.

According to the very helpful sharing above, it seems that the immediate publicity and instant popularity of a course, for a new professor no one knows, depends primarily on the name of the course. So we should redirect this debate to a question of naming.

So: what name?

My first thought for an effective and popular title would be:

TEL 169: SEX AND THE VIDEO GAME: BEER AND SEX

I checked the university course catalog and there hasn't been a course with this name since 1994, when the Actuarial Science Faculty were dismissed. It's available; maybe I should take it.

Well, I'm new as well and "Virtual Communities" gave me only about 60% of my max enrollment (19 for 30 slots). My department head said that "eCommunities" was too esoteric, and now I understand why she made me change the name. No doubt the beer approach would add 25% more students at a -30% reduction in quality, but would land you instant icon status here. Other non-PC suggestions: Get it On(line): Virtual Sex; Why Napster Rules; Play EverQuest--No Really, Play EverQuest

or perhaps the more playful:
Take the Red Pill: Virtual Worlds
Strangers, Friends and Enemies: Cybersociety

Whatever the new title is, try to implicate gaming. Video games are huge with your target demographic. Throw some of the more popular game titles into the title of your course. Then maybe you can link that part of the course title to a more esoteric portion (for the non-gamers).

Everquest and Far Cry: Living and (Inter)Acting in Virtual Worlds

Refashioning it as a lower level course could be a blessing in the long run. I've noticed that my enrollment in upper level seminars varies dramatically depending on whether I've taught larger basic courses to that particular year of students. For example, last year my cyberlaw seminar was oversubscribed with 28 students (max should be 18 or so). This year I only have 10 students. The main differnce is that I had not taught this year's seminar elegible students previously whereas I had tuaght at least half of those eligible the year before. In other words, you can build a bit of a following, and that can help make some of the more interesting upper-level courses a success in terms of enrollment.

Ted, I am sorry it was canceled in its original form. I think this course would rock and it certainly is cutting edge. Unfortunately I am fighting the same type of mentality at my college. I have to learn how to play the game of semantics better. I just am not a fan of doing that but I guess I will have to get over it. :)

Not that you need another book suggestion but I have fallen in love with Online Game Interactivity Theory by Markus Friedl. Thorough but brief history on MUDS and MMOs. Wonderful discussion on the psychology, sociology, and community aspects of game design. Gets into implementation elements that very much parallel elearning best practices and good teaching principles in online teaching (important to me given my role in Distance Learning at Fullerton). And it has a host of interviews with people in the game industry, some of whom post on here. :)

I also have been spending a good deal of time reading Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour: Virtual Worlds, Real Lives by Adam Joinson. This one is vying for the #1 MVB (Most Valuable Book) spot on my list.

And, btw, I am jealous!! This is EXACTLY the type of course I have been dying to teach. You are definitely in a good place!

Dmitri, while I would have been hard pressed to recommend this 18 months ago, I have finally been convinced by one of my Pepperdine profs that Etienne Wenger has indeed contributed some very important and significant work in the field of virtual communities and communities of practice. While Situated Learning would be way too dense for an undergrad class (Heck! I couldn't grasp or integrate all the concepts in my doctoral class when we had to read it. Finally, two years later I am not only getting it but (gasp!) applying it! /smile), Wenger does have Cultivating Communities of Practice that is geared for the more practical and every day needs most of us have. If you already have this one on your list and are a communities guru, forgive my ignorance. :)

Ok, this is too long for a first post...and I am supposed to be printing off boarding passes for Austin! See you there, Ted. And hopefully many of those posting here!

I had Wenger as a Ph.D. student and I think he does have a lot to contribute, but I don't know if my undergrads could hang with him. Like you said, he's pretty intense. This term I'm going to use the ideas in class (as much as I grok them myself, anyway) and see if it takes.